4 Marxism after Marx eastwards and the success in China of a peasant-based revolution that was in no sense proletarian, it was obvious that the connection with Marxs own ideas was becoming increasingly tenuous. But the largest gap in Marx's writings was in politics. The continued existence, and indeed growth, of nationalism was evidently a phenom- enon to which he paid far too little attention. Although strong on the analysis of contemporary political events(Eighteenth Brumaire, Class Struggle in france, Civil War in France), Marx left no coherent theory of the state, a topic to which he had intended to devote a whole book. This was the only part of his theoretical legacy that, according to him, only he could satisfactorily complete. The result was that only in the last few years have Marxists gone much beyond Marx himself in their work on the capitalist state. More importantly, from the practical point of view Marx had not had to deal with the problem of the relationship between leadership, party and masses. The only organisations in which Marx was active were the Communist League, which was a propaganda group only several hundred strong, and the First International, which was a loose federation of sects and trade unions. The era of the mass party came only after Marx's death. Although he had declared that the emancipa tion of the working class would be achieved by the workers themselves, it was clear that their leaders, beginning with Marx himself, would be almost exclusively of bourgeois origin. Thus anyone from a Leninist proposing a highly centralised'vanguard' party to lead workers(who would otherwise have the most inadequate views about politics)to a lib ertarian socialist who believed that political power should be vested directly in workers'assemblies- could claim, without fear of refutation that they were in the true Marxist tradition Finally, there was the question of Marx's philosophical legacy. In his early writings, Marx had talked of the abolition of philosophy, by which he meant that, in so far as philosophy posed ideal principles or essences, it would lose its function after a socialist revolution which embodied these principles or essences in socio-economic reality. However, with the revo- lution still a long way off, the 'footnotes to Plato had to be dealt with and the growing membership of Marxist parties required a 'philosophy'in the sense of a coherent system of principles giving a total explanation of the universe. Given the cultural climate of the late nineteenth century, this had to be couched in scientific-and even positivist-terms. Although the later Marx certainly had traces of such attitudes in his work, it was given systematic form by Engels and culminated in the philosophy of dialectical materialism propagated by Communist orthodoxy. The re-emphasis of the Hegelian(and therefore anti-scientific in the crude
Introduction: The Legacy of Marx 5 sense)elements in Marx,'s thought was led by Lukacs and given a firm foundation by the publication of Marx,'s early works. The notions of humanism and alienation were given unwonted prominence by many Marxists after 1930 and a long controversy ensued as to whether the young or the'oldMarx was the real one. This division is exemplified in Western Marxism by the opposition between the Frankfurt School and the structuralist marxists Note 1. K Marx, Selected Writings, ed. D. McLellan(Oxford, 2000)p 246. Further reading A reasonably full critical bibliography of Marx's writings and of the sec- ondary literature can be found in D. McLellan, Karl Marx: A Biography (London and New York, 2006)
二
Part One The german Social democrats Orthodoxies have an elastic quality to cover very different social groups, to unite them within a common terminology but inevitably the version of orthodoxy held by different social groups will be different, incorporating each group's specific perspective. Nigel Harris, Beliefs in Society 7
